Electronic Book Review - paul de manhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/tags/paul-de-man
enStanley Fish and the Place of Criticismhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/cloistral
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Christopher Knight</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1996-09-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>In <span class="booktitle">Representations of the Intellectual</span> (New York, 1994), Edward Said writes,</p>
<p class="longQuotation">The particular threat to the intellectual today, whether in the West or the non-Western world, is not the academy, nor the suburbs, nor the appalling commercialism of journalism and publishing houses, but rather an attitude that I will call professionalism. By professional I mean thinking of your own work as an intellectual as something you do for a living, between the hours of nine and five with one ear cocked at what is considered to be proper, professional behavior - not rocking the boat, not straying outside the accepted paradigms or limits, making yourself marketable and above all presentable, hence uncontroversial and unpolitical and “objective.” (74)</p>
<p>In favorable opposition to professionalism, Said offers “amateurism, the desire to be moved not by profit or reward but by love for and unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and barriers, in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values despite the restrictions of a profession” (76). An interesting and somewhat iconoclastic book, <span class="booktitle">Representations of the Intellectual</span> is, in fact, the published version of Said’s 1993 Reith Lectures, offered first, on BBC radio, to the British public, which must have especially welcomed the lecture entitled “Professionals and Amateurs” (from which the two quotations above appear), for it articulates a view, political sore points aside, shared by both the British academy and larger public: the suspicion of professionalism. Here, the late Donald Davie might be thought something of a representative spokesperson when, placing himself in opposition to “Americanists” and other field-identified academicians, he wrote:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">For those critics who aim above all at “professionalism” are only reflecting, in their own chosen sphere, the assumption that underlies Schools of Business Management, and the big corporations that recruit from them: the assumption that many minds systematically trained and collaborating will always outstrip one mind, self-trained, proceeding on its own with dedication and flair. (How much Dryden could have achieved in criticism if he had been enlisted in an organization that would have required him to collaborate with John Dennis and Nauham Tate!)</p>
<p class="longQuotation">(“Criticism and the Academy,” in <span class="booktitle">Criticism in the University</span>, ed. Gerald Graff and Reginald Gibbons [Chicago, 1985],175)</p>
<p>Given the British suspicions, it must, then, have required a certain amount of chutzpa for Stanley Fish to cross the ocean to deliver, in the form of the 1993 Clarendon Lectures at Oxford, what has now been published as <span class="booktitle">Professional Correctness</span>. I say this for the reason that the lectures, with their extolling of academic professionalization, go so much against the grain of British notions of dondom. Maybe some in the audience found themselves agreeing with Fish’s definition and embrace of “professionalization” as “a form of organization in which membership is acquired by a course of special training whose end is the production of persons who recognize one another not because they regularly meet at the same ceremonial occasions (unless one equates an MLA meeting with the Elizabethan court), but because they perform the same ‘moves’ in the same ‘game’ ” (32). But probably not many, and while Fish says that one of the pleasures of the Clarendon Lectures was the “number of chance meetings with members of the audience who pause on the street or in a café or in a bookshop to say hello and ask a question,” he also notes that the latter most often came “in the form of a mild (at least in tone) objection” (93). As well it might, for <span class="booktitle">Professional Correctness</span> is a decidedly American book, not only in its stance toward literary studies but also in terms of its anecdotes and evidence, almost all of which are drawn from the sphere of the American literary academy. It is an especially cloistral book that argues the need for even greater cloistering.</p>
<p>This does not necessarily mean that <span class="booktitle">Professional Correctness</span> is a bad book. In fact, it is often, as one has grown to expect from Fish, quite brilliant. He is especially acute in what he has to say with regard to the utopian ambitions of both cultural studies and interdisciplinarity. Patrick Brantlinger may, on behalf of cultural studies, argue the need for “a unified map of knowledge” (78), and Robert Scholes, on behalf of interdisciplinarity, the need to “make the object of study the whole intertextual system of relations that connects one text to others…the matrix or master code that the literary text both depends upon and modifies” (77); yet if we take seriously either of these ambitions we should also admit that the focus of our interests has shifted away from the analysis of specific literary texts and toward something more on par - at least in the grandness of its aspiration - with religion. “The hope that we can put all the jobs of work - all the so-called disciplines - together and form one large and unified field of knowledge (call it cultural studies),” writes Fish, “is the hope of interdisciplinary studies <span class="lightEmphasis">when it becomes a religion when it becomes an agenda called ‘interdisciplinarity’</span> and it is dashed when one realizes that different forms of disciplinary work, rather than being co-partners in a single teleological and utopian task, are engaged in performing the particular tasks that would pass away from the earth were they to lose themselves in the name of some grand synthesis…” (73). Fish is not against either interdisciplinarity or notions of unity - <span class="lightEmphasis">he thinks them practically inescapable</span> - but he is afraid that if we make these the principal objects of study, we put at risk that discipline which, for the last hundred years or more, has thrived under the rubric of literary studies. Of course, like any other discipline, literary studies is not immune to the contingencies of history and cultural transformation, and if we truly think it unworthy of our attention and affection, it too will pass away. But it is not quite clear that we do want it to pass away, and one even has the sense that the efforts of a Brantlinger and a Scholes are motivated in part by their own desire to rescue literary studies from moribundity.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most notable weakness of Fish’s book is that even as he argues the need to keep literary studies alive in the form that it has come down to us i.e., the scrupulous analysis of specific and quite singular (for reasons of their aesthetic value) texts he seems incapable of working up much enthusiasm for this in itself. For instance, in his first lecture, “Yet Once More,” he offers a reading, or the beginnings of a reading, of Milton’s <span class="booktitle">Lycidas</span> with the purpose of demonstrating less the rightness of this particular interpretation than the point “that <span class="booktitle">Lycidas</span> is a poem,” recognizably different from, say, “a political pamphlet or a sermon” by its quality of “linguistic and semantic density” (13). But having carried the reading forward for a few pages, he soon breaks it off, writing that “enough has been done, I trust, to support my point” (13) and later, referencing back, he writes, “After completing as much of the analysis as either you or I could bear…” (41). Clearly, the reading is meant to serve as an illustration for the argument that as a discipline literary criticism already comes equipped “by a sense of the questions appropriate to it” (41) but just as clearly, Fish’s interests seem to run much more to the argument to be made about the reading than to the reading itself.</p>
<p>Later, in the lecture “Why Literary Criticism is Like Virtue,” Fish, in demonstration of his belief that “literary interpretation, like virtue, is its own reward” (110), offers a more spirited reading, this time of a single line from <span class="booktitle">Paradise Lost</span>, yet it is easy to come away from <span class="booktitle">Professional Correctness</span> with the sense that the author’s enthusiasm for traditional literary studies is somewhat forced, and that, at least as far as he is concerned, it really is in a moribund state. Nor is it quite clear how we are to help matters, Fish finding it easier to say why the proffered solutions - e.g., new historicism, cultural studies, interdisciplinary studies, and so on - are not the answer. Here, his most forceful rebuttals are offered in lectures three, “Disciplinary Tasks and Political Intentions,” and four, “Looking Elsewhere: Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity.” In the first of these, Fish stresses the need to “distinguish between the general (and trivial) sense in which everything is political - the sense in which every action is ultimately rooted in a contestable point of origin - and the more usual sense of ‘political’ when the word is used to refer to actions performed with the intention of winning elections or influencing legislators” (50). His sense is that literary academics are prone to imagine that when they engage in “subversive readings” they are truly helping to move society in a more progressive direction, that their politics are real rather than superficial. Yet Fish makes the worthwhile point that if you wish to effect real political change, you need to speak in a public language that the larger community understands. Subversive readings of Spenser and Shakespeare, couched in the privacies of disciplinary discourse, are not going to result in that change, except as politics is understood as the most attenuated of affairs: “An interpretation of <span class="booktitle">Othello</span> that marks out the dynamics of race-consciousness in a manner that might gain it publication in <span class="booktitle">Representations</span> is not in itself going to constitute an effective intervention in our anguished national conversation about race; and an analysis of gender reversals in <span class="booktitle">Macbeth</span> or <span class="booktitle">Coriolanus</span> will not move members of the public, wherever they might be situated, to rethink the case against abortion” (51). Literary scholars have no clear access to the halls of political power, and, Fish believes, they best acknowledge this rather than go on thinking that they are changing the world rather than one of its smallest postal districts. [ <span class="lightEmphasis">Link to essays and ripostes on <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/outselling">“the politics of selling out”</a> for further discussion on academics, publishers, and the public sphere, Eds.</span> ]</p>
<p>Meanwhile, in “Looking Elsewhere” Fish argues that cultural studies and interdisciplinarity both present themselves as projects designed to put us into a truer or more real relation to some ultimate ground: the Context of contexts. The practitioners of such projects delight in telling us that our literary understandings are historically and socially contingent, that they are transitory, that their claims of coherence and unity are bogus, and that rather than being the expression of something real, they are, in fact, the most jerrybuilt of constructions. To which Fish aptly replies:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">“So what?” The fact that a self-advertised unity is really a grab-bag of disparate elements held together by the conceptual equivalent of chicken-wire, or by shifting political and economic alliances, or by a desire to control the production and dissemination of knowledge, does not make the unity disappear; it merely shows what the unity is made of, not that it isn’t one. Just because the unity is underwritten by rhetoric rather than by nature or logic in no way lessens the force of its operation in the moments of its existence. So long as it is even temporarily established, the unity of a discipline has a material existence and therefore has material effects that no analysis can dispel. (74)</p>
<p>As a pragmatist, Fish is clearly not too bothered by the imputation that literary studies, like other fields, is a construction. Granting this does not change the fact that literature - be it in the form of novels by Eliot, Woolf, and Gaddis; or of poems by Keats, Moore, and Ashbery - still constitutes a force in our world, one which, in the here and now, we do better for understanding. Not everyone will think this understanding essential to their intellectual makeup, but to the extent that a significant minority does, it will make more sense for its members to direct their attentions to the way in which these novels, poems, and so on acquire their value, and to what makes a novel different from a poem, and to what makes one novel different from another, including of course the differences associated with distinct authorship, culture, epoch, and so on. It will also make sense to think, says Fish, more about a literary work’s meaning, and to acknowledge that “trying to figure out what a poem means will be quite another activity from trying to figure out which interpretation of a poem will contribute to the war effort or to the toppling of the patriarchy” (75). Here, Fish’s larger point is that if too many members of this minority start to shift their attention away from the more local sorts of knowledge entailed in the study of literature, the eventual consequence will be that they will not be studying literature but something else. Or as Fish writes in his critique of the cultural studies work done by Brantlinger:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Still, one might say, even if the cultural studies must fail of its aspiration to reveal the deep causal structure of things, it can do something; it can produce a new object, another text. But that text - what Brantlinger calls the cultural text - has no epistemological or ontological superiority over the texts (of literature, history, law, etc.) it displaces. That is, it is not a larger text or a more inclusive text; it is just a different text, with its own emphases, details, and meanings of other texts. The cultural text, if it comes into view, will not provide a deeper apprehension of the literary text or the legal text; rather it will erase them even in the act of referring to them, for the references will always be produced from its angle of interest, not theirs. If cultural studies tells us to look elsewhere to find the meaning of the literary text, I say that if you look elsewhere, you will see something else. (79)</p>
<p>Fish makes no claim that literature is indispensable or that it is a form of sacred knowledge; he only says if it continues to be recognized as a force in this world we should be in a better position to say why this is if we make literature itself, rather than something else, the object of our attention. This does not mean that literature exists in a completely separate space, or that it does not have frequent intercourse with everything that is non-literary. It is simply a pragmatic recognition that as we, unlike God (72), cannot be in all places at once, we should do well to make ourselves expert in that corner - literature - that we profess to take an interest in, or otherwise risk disciplinary and professional suicide. All this seems sensible enough, at least until the penultimate lecture, where Fish, in a gesture of unnecessary compensation, goes too far in the other direction: toward accentuating the self-delighting, self-reflexive aspect of literary study. Not only does he argue, as noted, that “literary interpretation, like virtue, is its own reward,” but also that “I do it because I like the way I feel I’m when doing it” (111) and that “I will take my enjoyment wherever I can find it” (111). Here, literary study is imagined as just one more “game” (Fish: “when I run out of sources and analogues, similarities and differences, I go to the history of the criticism which not only allows me to continue the game, but to secure my place in it by linking my own efforts to those of past giants” [111].), less meaningful as a way to get us through the night than as a pleasant way to pass the day. That only those who live lives of some luxury will need to find ways to pass the day may be bruited about elsewhere but not here. As a result, Fish’s pitch for literature comes off seeming too much like a bad adman’s notion that he can interest a generation grown tired with Nintendo and Myst in the truly ultimate game: literature. And while no one disputes Fish’s salesmanship, this one looks like a particularly hard sell.</p>
<p>One final objection I should wish to make with regard to Fish’s notion of literature and its study is that he thinks the two performances more akin than they, in fact, are. He speaks of “the relationship between writers and their readers” not as one “between agents with differing tasks and objectives but as one between agents engaged in the mutual performance of a single task” (14). The task, writes Fish, is an interpretative one, joining writer and critic in a communal enterprise that makes questions regarding individual choice seem irrelevant:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">When I use words like “institution” or “community” I refer not to a collection of independent individuals who, in a moment of deliberation, choose to employ certain interpretative strategies, but rather to a set of practices that are defining of an enterprise and fill the consciousness of the enterprise’s members. Those members include the authors and speakers as well as their interpreters. (14)</p>
<p>There is much truth in this, but the problem is that Fish doesn’t go far enough, doesn’t take into account all the ways, or even some of the ways, that artist and critic work at cross purposes, especially the way in which criticism has traditionally played a disciplinary role vis-à-vis poetry’s more individualistic and disruptive energies. After all, as Mark Edmundson points out, “[l]iterary criticism in the West begins with the wish that literature disappear. Plato’s chief objection to Homer is that he exists” (Literature Against Philosophy, <span class="booktitle">Plato to Derrida: A Defence of Poetry</span> [Cambridge, 1995], 1). Nor have the relations between criticism and literature much improved since, as even the most casual glance at the present-day literary scene will testify. What could a contemporary author do but shudder upon hearing de Man, after deconstructing a passage in Proust, declare: “The whole of literature would respond in similar fashion…” (<span class="booktitle">The Allegories of Reading</span> [New Haven, 1979], 16). If this were the case, what should be the need for new novels, poems, and plays? Certainly, de Man’s criticism, like that of his colleagues in deconstruction, didn’t suggest the need for such. Or as Edmundson writes: “the canon of so-called literature that de Man and his disciples worked up was minuscule: one encounters respectful de Manian readings of Rousseau, Wordsworth, Rilke, Rousseau, Hölderlin, more Rousseau, more Wordsworth, and very few others” (49). Yet if it has been in the nature “of literature since Homer…to proliferate narrative, to spread before the reader a vast array of incidents that, while they may have much to teach, resist being housed under any given sign or system of signs” (Edmundson, 14), criticism should probably give more thought to the ways in which it can be responsive to this proliferation, rather than detached from, and even hostile to, it. Here, thinking of writers and critics as committed to the same “task,” and thinking of literary studies as needing – in the spirit of doctors, lawyers and other professionals - to further solidify its credentialing apparatuses, may (the logical appeal of Fish’s arguments notwithstanding) not be the best way to proceed. This sense of the matter is only strengthened by Fish’s own thinly disguised lack of interest in literature itself.</p>
<p>Still, while it is possible to raise serious objections to Fish’s book, <span class="booktitle">Professional Correctness</span> remains a timely and important work. In fact, only someone of Fish’s professional stature could, at the present moment, make the argument that literary studies needs to be more attentive to its own household without finding him - or herself characterized as “retrograde and reactionary” (1). Of course, some will still make the charge, and Fish knows this. It doesn’t make him happy, but he thinks the argument needs stating; and having, over the years, strengthened his skills as an upstream swimmer, he can withstand and even counteract the current’s pounding. For this, and much more, we owe him our gratitude.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/said">said</a>, <a href="/tags/scholes">scholes</a>, <a href="/tags/brantlinger">brantlinger</a>, <a href="/tags/milton">milton</a>, <a href="/tags/spenser">spenser</a>, <a href="/tags/shakespeare">shakespeare</a>, <a href="/tags/donald-davie">donald davie</a>, <a href="/tags/christopher-knight">christopher knight</a>, <a href="/tags/american-academy">american academy</a>, <a href="/tags/mark-edmundson">Mark Edmundson</a>, <a href="/tags/paul-de-man">paul de man</a>, <a href="/tags/plato">Plato</a>, <a href="/tags/stanley-fish">stanley fish</a>, <a href="/tags/england">england</a>, <a href="/tags/britain">britain</a>, <a href="/tags/united-states">united states</a>, <a href="/tags/usa">usa</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator786 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comFurther Notes From the Prison-House of Languagehttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/technic
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Linda C Brigham</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2001-09-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>
I suppose I would call Mark Hansen’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Embodying Technesis</span><br />
a “working through” of some major threads in poststructuralism<br />
in order to rescue technology from enchantment. This description is<br />
mildly metaphorical; “working through” is a psychoanalytical phrase<br />
referring to the process of reclaiming traumatic material, by definition<br />
unrepresentable, for representation, thus restoring a coherent<br />
life-narrative to the trauma-sufferer. Although it smacks of Harold<br />
Bloom to see one’s philosophical and critical progenitors as<br />
“traumatic,” it makes common enough sense to see the mastery of theory<br />
as its translation into one’s own language from the alien language of<br />
others, and, subsequently, to see such translation as a way to put<br />
theory in its place - just as we put a traumatic event in its place when<br />
we work through trauma. This analogy is a little troubling, though,<br />
because it means that in the process of working through theory, Hansen<br />
would be doing to poststructuralism precisely what he claims<br />
poststructuralism does to technology: putting it into discourse,<br />
reducing its alterity to a signified other. In fact, Hansen’s term<br /><span class="emphasis">technesis</span><br />
means just that: the process of putting technology into<br />
discourse - reducing its “robust material exteriority” - one of the<br />
book’s refrains - to a ghostly negativity, a residue of the human, the<br />
cultural.
</p>
<p>But logical quibbling aside: the book, in its account of<br />
poststructuralism’s shortcomings with respect to technology, reads like<br />
a working-through. The book’s structure has a quest romance quality<br />
where each of the philosophical trajectories Hansen covers looms up to<br />
be defeated by the sword of technology ITSELF, that is, by an agent<br />
exterior to culture and cultural inscription. Science studies,<br />
deconstruction, psychoanalysis and (I know no appropriate label) Deleuze<br />
and Guattari all loom up, only to be beaten back, beaten down by a very<br />
similar series of strokes. The hero proves himself in trial with a<br />
serially returning repressed. For the reader, as for the psychoanalyst,<br />
the scene seems more repetitive than one suspects it is for the writer<br />
or the analysand; one cannot help but suspect that victory is not the<br />
only motive here - that there is some occult charge transferred in<br />
fingering over the adversary’s features - again and again - before the<br />
last goodbye.</p>
<p>
But I do not mean this as a dismissive criticism - in fact, I<br />
would hope the reader of this book (as well as this review) holds on to<br />
the end, for Hansen does sketch an alternative to technesis that<br />
presages an important program for rethinking “the problem of<br />
technology.” But getting there requires an extraordinary amount of fast<br />
travel. Hansen begins the book with a review and evaluation of recent<br />
cultural criticism focused on relations between technology and<br />
embodiment, a rocky road of various concrete scenes, theoretical<br />
approaches and historiographies, including Bruno Latour, N. Katherine<br />
Hayles,<br /><a class="internal" href="brighamopnece">Brigham wrote on How We<br />
Became Posthuman in the Spring of 1999</a><br />
Michelle Kendrick and a few others. The heterogeneity and<br />
richness of these theorists make the job of adequate summary nearly<br />
impossible - and the problem of summarizing plagues the whole volume<br />
because of its immense scope. On the whole, considering the task, Hansen<br />
does an impressive and intelligent work, given the impossibility of<br />
satisfaction, but the opening section, precisely because of the variety<br />
and specificity - the deliberate situatedness of the work of many of<br />
those he considers - is perhaps the roughest part of the book. So it is<br />
difficult, particularly here, to acquiesce to Hansen’s claim that all of<br />
these critics fall under the spell of language and overwrite, to a<br />
greater or lesser degree, the concrete alterity of technology. It is<br />
especially hard to see why that overwriting is important, given what<br />
these writers<br /><span class="emphasis">do</span><br />
offer.
</p>
<p>The path smoothes out somewhat in Part 2, where Hansen<br />
elaborates what he calls the “machine reduction” of technology, the<br />
shortcomings that undermine deconstruction’s supposed materiality.<br />
Derrida purportedly exposes the machinic nature of writing, the coreless<br />
core of the supposedly autonomous human agent. However, as Hansen<br />
argues, this antihumanist scandal is actually a way of domesticating the<br />
machine. Deconstruction inherits a reduction of technology stemming from<br />
Aristotle, a reduction that continues to form the backdrop for Western<br />
thought. Derrida, in exposing the machine as that which is disguised as<br />
the subordinated instrumentality of writing, depends for its effect on<br />
friction with the grain of Aristotle, and produces only a discursive<br />
machine, a reduction of the materiality of technology to text, an<br />
artificial agent. Postmodernity fares less well than modernism in this<br />
respect; although one would expect Heidegger, in his famously humanist<br />
“Question Concerning Technology,” to be a key target of Hansen’s charge<br />
of technological reduction, Derrida comes in for more criticism than<br />
Heidegger. Heidegger, says Hansen, is rather obviously defensive about<br />
technology, and his criticism of its alienating effects barely conceals<br />
acknowledgment of its potential as an exterior threat to authenticity -<br />
wherein technology has the status of an agent. Derrida, in effecting a<br />
supposed closure to Heideggerian metaphysics, in fact only develops<br />
another way to overwrite technology: by presenting it as textuality.<br />
Technology becomes a structuring negative, a gravitational center around<br />
which humanity and culture acquire their respective order. Likewise,<br />
Derrida subverts the promise of Paul de Man’s attempt to unwrite the<br />
overwriting of technology through the notion of allegory. While de Man<br />
critically disjoins memory and technology, Derrida, with his notion of<br />
artificial memory, memory as technology, brings them together once again<br />
- reducing technology’s exteriority and locating it under the skin.</p>
<p>Part Three, the last major section of critique, sweeps through<br />
Lacanian psychoanalysis and Deleuze and Guattari’s demolition of<br />
subjects into “desiring machines.” For Hansen, Lacan’s emphasis on the<br />
symbolic works very much like deconstruction’s emphasis on the machine<br />
quality of textuality. The Real, for Lacan, is not robust; rather it is<br />
always seen from the point of view of the symbolic, from the subject,<br />
and is assimilated to the world of the subject as the impossible object<br />
of desire. In contrast to the early Freud, whose<br />
quasi-neurophysiological theories of perception emphasized the<br />
unprocessed element of perception, Lacan (and Derrida) subvert<br />
exteriority into a disturbance of signification. Hansen turns to the<br />
work of Deleuze and Guattari with similar misgivings on these theorists’<br />
emphasis on desire. D+G, as he refers to them, have a more promising<br />
program than deconstruction or Lacanian psychoanalysis because of the<br />
antirepresentationalism and anti-subjectivism of their key concept of<br />
deterritorialization. They move towards conceptualizing a relation to<br />
exteriority as a kind of rhythmic flux that does not invoke<br />
signification. But the subject, and representation, lingers in the<br />
dependence of the notion of deterritorialization - along with nomadic<br />
science, along with “experience” - on their opposites, on<br />
reterritorialization, on the state, and on thought. The movement across<br />
and between these polarities becomes the subject of desire, and as in<br />
Lacan, desire becomes a defensive appropriation of the exteriority of<br />
technology.</p>
<p>
A book with such a tremendously ambitious philosophical and<br />
critical scope is bound to raise readers’ complaints about the short<br />
shrift their own favorite figures have received. Certainly aficionados<br />
of German media theory will be disturbed by Hansen’s dismissal of<br />
Friedrich Kittler (systems theory also gets a glib treatment) - and this<br />
is too bad, because these are readers who I imagine would be very<br />
interested in Hansen’s overall agenda. Tucked away in “Interlude 2,” the<br />
last stop before we arrive at Hansen’s recommendation for a solution to<br />
all these shortcomings, Hansen’s remarks on Kittler are both puzzling<br />
and unconvincing. He refers to Kittler’s treatment of the media that<br />
compose the “materialities of communication” as “background” to “our<br />
contemporary forms of knowledge production” (221), a formulation that<br />
makes Kittler sound like he is filling in the gaps of intellectual<br />
history. Yet Hansen acknowledges that Kittler, far more concretely than<br />
D+G, presents technology as having effects prior to and outside of<br />
subjectification, formative of sensory experience itself. However,<br />
paradoxically, Hansen takes this emphasis on technology as tending<br />
towards a disembodied antihumanism - for which his basis is Kittler’s<br />
enigmatic essay, “There is No Software.” Hansen doesn’t understand the<br />
essay (a fact that only sets him among the majority of its readers, this<br />
writer included); he seems to view it as a program for increasing<br />
hardware efficiency, when the essay actually underwrites a crucial<br />
distinction between programmability (which presumably includes hardware<br />
efficiency, unless you very specifically reorient what is generally<br />
meant by efficiency) and nonprogrammability, a distinction between<br />
Turing machines and other kinds of machines and humans.<br /><a class="internal" href="clarkece">Bruce Clarke writes about<br />
Friedrich Kittler’s Technosublime in the Winter 99/00 ebr</a>
</p>
<p>
Nonetheless, after these serial turnings, we at last arrive at<br />
an engaging “right way” with technology in the late work of Walter<br />
Benjamin. Fortunately, it is a real alternative to the thrust the book<br />
critiques. The later Benjamin - the last chapter riffs on “Some Motifs<br />
in Baudelaire” - does indeed counter the textual focus of deconstruction<br />
and Lacan’s symbolic - in that it offers no object at all - and<br />
therefore has no subject either. Hansen summarizes Benjamin’s<br />
revalidation of<br /><italics>Erlebnis</italics><br />
lived experience - a phrase properly understood oxymoronically.<br />
Living constitutes a continual simultaneity, an intersection of life<br />
with event, a Ballardian crash - while “experience” - as emphasized in<br /><italics>Erlebnis’s</italics><br />
opposite,<br /><italics>Erfahrung</italics><br />
- records, temporalizes, memorializes precisely those events<br />
that are not fully lived.<br /><italics>Erlebnis</italics><br />
“experiences” the other -including the technological other -<br />
through<br /><italics>mimesis</italics>, the registry of the other in the body rather than in<br />
representation. So film, as a mimetic rendering of its object, has a<br />
direct sensory appeal that undermines and precedes understanding, and in<br />
this respect it poses for Benjamin the potential of bypassing<br />
interiority and the linguistic alienation of self from self “the<br />
subject” constitutes - in the process putting an end to technesis.<br />
Benjamin’s essay also supports the elements of Freud Hansen favors, the<br />
physiological theorizing that depicts consciousness, especially<br />
consciousness in relation to shock experience, as prior to and exclusive<br />
of memory. Memory begins where consciousness ends.
</p>
<p>
Yet this approach is certainly not exclusively Benjamin’s -<br />
especially this view of mimesis. Judith Butler, as well as many other<br />
feminists and queer theorists, have questioned the preeminence of the<br />
symbolic in Lacan. Butler - along with Diana Fuss, Kaja Silverman,<br />
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, and others - has suggested that an<br />
unsymbolically-mediated identification precedes subjectification, and<br />
continues to lurk beneath it. In fact, I think the connection of<br />
Hansen’s approach to Alice Jardine’s in<br /><span class="booktitle">Gynesis</span><br />
is far more substantial than he acknowledges, and resources from<br />
gender theory have the potential to massively enrich what Hansen is<br />
drawing from Benjamin. All in all, Hansen’s conclusion is both too<br />
specific and too fragmentary - another sign that he is working through<br />
his paternal adversaries in high (and male-dominated) theory rather than<br />
making a calculated argument for a new agenda. I would anticipate that<br />
Hansen’s next work will invoke a conceptual rather than an<br />
author-structured basis for making distinctions. One distinction offers<br />
itself immediately (so to speak): Hansen’s praise seems reserved for<br />
nonreflexive approaches to alterity - where reflexivity is the process<br />
of representing otherness in order to perform work on the<br />
representation, which mediates work on the world. While non- or<br />
anti-reflexivity is unlikely to offer a way, as Hansen suggests in the<br />
course of his comments on Bergson, “to restore solidarity between<br />
individual and collective life” (241), or at least one would hope not,<br />
it is nonetheless a crucial alternative experience to the massively<br />
overdeveloped reflexivity that now governs us, often through the<br />
distributed consciousnesses of actuarial tables and massively networked<br />
financial connectivity, leading to ever more disturbingly robust forms<br />
of social synchronization under global regimes of communication. Our<br />
great challenge is to awaken from a world where exteriority has no<br />
chance, where feedback is always already appropriated and redeployed by<br />
the system. This is not a new thought, but we are not done with it, and<br />
it is certainly at least as timely now as it ever was.
</p>
<p>
&gt;&gt;—&gt;<br /><a class="internal" href="hansenrip">Mark Hansen responds</a>.
</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/mark-hansen">mark hansen</a>, <a href="/tags/poststructuralism">poststructuralism</a>, <a href="/tags/harold-bloom">harold bloom</a>, <a href="/tags/deleuze">deleuze</a>, <a href="/tags/guattari">guattari</a>, <a href="/tags/derrida">derrida</a>, <a href="/tags/paul-de-man">paul de man</a>, <a href="/tags/friedrich-kittler">friedrich kittler</a>, <a href="/tags/ecology">ecology</a>, <a href="/tags/ecological-media-theory">ecological media theory</a>, <a href="/tags/systems-theory">systems theory</a>, <a href="/tags/ecocriticism">ecocriticism</a>, <a href="/tags/ecocritical">ecocritical</a>, <a href="/tags/eco-criticism">eco-criticism</a>, <a href="/tags/eco-critical">eco-critical</a>, <a href="/tags/software">software</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator713 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com